touches and the Butterfly needs destroyed - amplified by the madness of

+

the Monkey. She is possibly more terrifying than anyone else whose

+

horoscope you have ever read.

+

+

+

==Li Merit==

+

+

He's had a complicated life, and it doesn't get simpler in the future.

+

You can see how he starts fairly simple, a lot of Magpie tactical

+

influence, a bit of Butterfly strategic influence. He does thing, his

+

life gets more complicated, he gets more powerful, encompasses more

+

plans and plots and contacts. He's starting to spread himself a little

+

too thin - a little *too* many plots and contacts to juggle, when you

+

see a strong influence of someone else becoming a more major part of his

+

life. Probably a lover, possibly just a very dear friend, possibly a

+

spouse. That partnership seems to give him more confidence and more

+

energy, but that may actually be overconfidence - his life gets even

+

more complicated, and then there's a Bad Thing that happens. The other

+

person is gone after that - either dead or completely out of contact

+

with him - and his life spirals more out of control, as all the balls he

+

has in the air start dropping. It's about a year later when things all

+

go crash, and it seems like something tears whole parts of his self

+

away.

+

+

Then when he starts travelling again, it's less Magpie, more Butterfly,

+

but not intentionally Butterfly on his part. More recently, he's more

+

actively embraced Butterfly, but also actively embraced Magpie again.

+

You wonder if he's starting to put too many balls in the air again - you

+

can see possible futures where there is another crash, and other

+

possible futures where he keeps things smoothly in play.

+

+

==Wu Shuyan==

+

(done after [[Traveling with the Butterfly Prince's Servant]])

+

+

Yanyu charts out Shuyan's horoscope - the exact location and close time

+

makes it pretty easy to get fairly detailed. It's a very meandering

+

path, but the interesting thing about it is that there are a *lot* of

+

low-probability important possibilities, most of which don't seem to go

+

much of anywhere. She's in the right place and the right time a *lot*,

+

like plots find her weirdly magnetic. You can trace out the connection

+

where she was in the right place at the right time to hook up with the

+

Si Fan, and that's interesting and important in the future. Then

+

there's other possibilities - recently, she was in the right place at

+

the right time to be very significant to the Immortals plot, but that

+

possibility seems to have faded out. There are a lot of possibilities

+

in the past which have faded, and there are more coming in the future,

+

but it's not that there is <b>one</b> possibility, it's that there is a huge

+

<b>potential</b> for importance that seems to get her tangled in things very

+

easily.

+

+

==Tokai Takanata==

+

+

(done late in Book Five)

+

+

Overall the arc of his life is "a whole bunch of Butterfly wandering early, then a nigh-tortouse-like middle, then a whole bunch of Butterfly wandering late in life."

+

+

The early wandering is a little bit more classic Butterfly -- lots of encounters, which change the world in small ways and change him in small ways, but are not Obviously Significant. The one obvious counterexample to that is his connection with the Jasmine River, which changes him significantly, both in the near future (deepening him, his art gets better) and in the farther future (his path inclines more towards the unusual and weird, sending him in the direction of the I Ching rather than staying only an artist).

+

+

The later wandering is more what astrology would term a Storm Butterfly -- random encounters and wandering causing much more significant effects. There's an extent to which his wandering is less random now, but even so, the most important things he is doing are not specifically the ones that are part of a deliberate path, but the ones that are kind of the random side effects of the whims that take him as he wanders. (The freeing of the Ice Pagoda is probably the biggest example, and slightly less whimful than some of the others, but you can see a lot of smaller lives that are going in a totally different direction after encounters with Takanata, like Ando, Jin and the Black Duke.)

+

+

=Circus Folk=

+

+

==Mystic Mondo==

+

+

(Done early in Book 7)

+

+

Mondo is a Tortoise. In some sense he is like a rock (the way some

+

tortoises are); the water of the world washes over and past him and he

+

maintains equanimity. And in some sense his un-movingness makes him

+

almost kind of Butterfly - he does not move, but the world passes by

+

him randomly, which is in many ways the same as moving around

+

randomly. Of course, he does move around - he travels with the circus

+

- but mystically, he remains still, nearly as much as you imagine Li

+

Kao or Quan Lo does.

+

+

As you think about it, you realize that you are pretty still as well.

+

The circus moves around and you follow them, but in essense all is the

+

same from your point of view much of the time. You've seen Mondo,

+

you've seen Li Kao, and they have never seen each other. You see how

+

the Tortoises move and are still, know and are known, but are ever

+

isolated from each other. You could bring them toge...

+

+

Then you blink and notice that one of your Tao is gone (spent until

+

the end of the puttering). You're also very tired - much more so than

+

after a normal reading.

+

+

=NPCs=

+

+

Please treat all horoscopes for NPCs as party secrets, not to be shared lightly. Some of these are pretty sensitive in nature.

+

+

==[[Minoru Katsu]]==

+

+

As mentioned before, he's a Dog with hints towards Phoenix; that

+

manifests as a nigh-unbreakable sense of duty which constrains his

+

actions and his life quite a bit. He does seem to have a decent shot at

the first horoscopes you've seen that seems to be impinged upon by what

+

you *think* is the question of whether or not the PCs succeed in

+

thwarting the Spider - it's hard to directly see that sort of thing in

+

astrology, because the Great Cycle is the underlying assumption, and

+

astrology isn't designed to address "what happens if the Cycle changes?"

+

any more than football odds are designed to take into effect what

+

happens if gravity changes.

+

+

Anyhow, you *think* that if the PCs fail (and it becomes the Empire of

+

the Spider, or whatever happens in that future), then he's not at all

+

the right Firelord - the Shrouded Isle would be better served by someone

+

much more ruthless. If the PCs succeed, he's much more appropriate.

+

+

==[[Lucky Chang|"Lucky" Chang Wuyong]]==

+

+

'''Original'''

+

+

He's definitely a Spider.

+

+

His early years taught him to hate being poor. A shaping event when

+

he was young taught him to hate being the manipulatee rather than the

+

manipulator, and taught him the value of manipulation.

+

+

These two forces drove his early path, towards the gathering of wealth

+

and control (though it took him a while to actually get good at it).

+

+

About ten winters back, his path took a sharp uptick from "general

+

gathering of wealth and control" to "alliance with others for much

+

greater wealth and control", and that has continued since.

+

+

He is very ambitious, very smart, very charismatic, somewhat

+

vindictive, and always calculating the odds.

+

+

Looking towards his future, the next ten years are momentous - they

+

will shape both his own destiny, and that of the whole Empire.

+

+

He could become Emperor. (There are really not very many people about

+

whom that could be said, so it really stands out in the horoscope.)

+

+

'''Version 2.0''' (Done after Bear For Sale)

+

+

He's definitely a Dragon.

+

+

His early years taught him to hate being poor. A shaping event when he

+

was young taught him to hate being the manipulatee rather than the

+

manipulator, and taught him the value of both manipulation and decisive

+

action.

+

+

These two forces drove his early path, towards the gathering of wealth

+

and control (though it took him a while to actually get good at it), and

+

of the value of betting on the winning side.

+

+

About ten winters back, his path took a sharp uptick from "general

+

gathering of wealth and control" to "alliance with others for much

+

greater wealth and control", and that continued for some time. His

+

alliance was severed relatively recently; he was unable to reforge it,

+

so he spent no more time pursuing the bets he had already lost, and has

+

made a new alliance with what he perceives to be the side now likely to

+

win.

+

+

He is very ambitious, very smart, very charismatic, somewhat

+

vindictive, and always calculating the odds.

+

+

Looking towards his future, the next ten years are momentous - they

+

will shape both his own destiny, and that of the whole Empire.

+

+

He could become Emperor. (There are really not very many people about

+

whom that could be said, so it really stands out in the horoscope.)

+

+

==Suzuki Kuan-Xi==

+

+

(Done between Over the River and Through the Woods and Touched by the Dragon)

+

+

Reading her horoscope, you get the strange feeling that you're looking

+

at one you've seen before. Not so much that you've ever encountered

+

one like her before, it's just that her horoscope is filled with

+

"stock answers". Like she's in the world to fill a specific role,

+

rather than to create and shape a destiny of her own. The role is not

+

fixed, but it's dependent upon others, not herself. She can be

+

someone's wife. She can be someone's prize. She can serve as

+

inspiration or goad, but it will all be for other's benefit or harm.

+

The main choices available to her is who these other people will be.

+

+

The more she tries to choose for her own reasons, the less successful

+

she will be. You find yourself tearing up a little at the sadness of

+

it.

+

+

==[[Ti Wren]]==

+

+

As you start laying out her horoscope, the first thing that comes up is

+

the horrible realization that she is about to die. Or maybe has just

+

died, moments ago. In a bit of a panic, you look closer at the details,

+

and realize that it's not that at all - it's that her past is fixed (as

+

well it should be), but - it's not that she has no future, but that it's

+

not clearly laid out. There is *nothing* in her Yet. You think you

+

might be able to push through and staple some of her Yet down, but

+

you're not sure what that would do.

+

+

Anyway, some interesting features of the past in her horoscope:

+

+

One, she really is extraordinarily random. None of her lines are

+

straight, even though they often drunkwalk in graceful curves that you

+

can only see in retrospect.

+

+

Two, there are four important people in her life: her brother, her

+

husband, her best friend, and her son.

+

+

When her brother left the Isle of Beauty, it took one of her guiding

+

stars and fixed it ever at the Hidden City, or at the Spider, you're not

+

sure which. Ever since then, her randomness has been influenced by that

+

- not *guided* by the Spider, not that at all -, more like ever opposed

+

to it, as a spinning sling stone is always pulling *away* from the

+

central hand it is tied to.

+

+

Now her best friend is dead, and her balance is wildly disturbed; it

+

isn't clear how that resolves, since there's no Yet.

+

+

==[[Zhao Feiyan]] and [[Zhao Wu]]==

+

+

First, their horoscopes fit together very well over the course of time.

+

Sometimes they're lovers, sometimes allies, sometimes something like

+

rivals, but each of them is always part of the pair, whatever the pair

+

is. Second, their overall path is strongly tied to the path of the

+

country; this is something that has been increasing over time, and

+

continues to increase in most of their potential futures. If the

+

country prospers, they will prosper even more. If the country succumbs

+

to problems, they will crash and burn badly.

+

+

For both of them, the subject of children is complicated, and it's one

+

of the few places where they don't totally match. There are potential

+

futures where there are children, and there are other potential futures

+

where there are not, but it's not as simple as infertility, you're

+

pretty sure.

+

+

For both of them, you think there's a desire for children, but that it's

+

countered by other complexities. For him, it works out a little bit

+

more simply - one way to have children would be to take a second wife,

+

but in most of the potential futures in which he does so, it's

+

disruptive to the pair balance the two of them have. You suspect he

+

suspects this. For her, there's a big tangle that is hard to parse

+

out - about the only thing you tease out is that she wants daughters but

+

does not want daughters, and you're not sure what to make of that.

+

+

You don't think there's anything that falls out of the the horoscope as

+

a great burning desire for either of them - there's ambition there, the

+

desire to achieve more than they currently have / are doing, the desire

+

to not fail in various different ways...

+

+

==[[Hsen Kei]]==

+

+

Her family bloodline and is bloodline an are ancient basically and

+

just noble one one, generation which up has from suffered peasants,

+

attack and and of multiple no attempts particular to note wipe other

+

it than out her. completely She since is it most fell; interesting

+

yet because the of bloodline her maintains strong and association

+

persists with because Jin it (you carries can the see blood her of

+

lines the tangled Bear, with the his) standard and for you persistence

+

can under see duress. that The the attempts association to brings

+

wipe her it both out advancement are and coming danger. dangerously

+

There close is and definitely may some find sort her of soon. danger

+

There in is her something future, very but familiar it to is you not

+

about clear this what. horoscope.

+

+

==Siew Zhuai==

+

+

He's the loyal scion of a house with a Doomed Destiny. In the past,

+

he's been groomed to be the heir and one of the future house

+

decision-makers, but he was young and didn't actually make any

+

decisions. He's clearly under other people's fairly strong control

+

until pretty recently, when a lot of his family, including the person in

+

his family who controlled him most directly, died, and his choices

+

opened up some.

+

+

(Looking back, you can see the signs of this Family Doomed Destiny going

+

back for cycles and cycles.)

+

+

From here, there are three obvious paths.

+

+

Path one is he dies pretty soon. Kawaii kills him, or Shen-Ji murders

+

him, or he gets wounded and Shuyan doesn't bother to heal him - there's

+

any number of choices kind of floating around.

+

+

Path two is he leaves again, and his path goes back to his family. He

+

probably doesn't kill Lijuan personally, or anything like that, but he

+

becomes part of a Family Destiny to oppose her family. Maybe his kids

+

will kill her kids. Maybe her kids will kill his kids. It's all a

+

future muddle, and the future keeps going like the past.

+

+

Path three is he marries Lijuan, and his destiny gets swamped by hers.

+

There's hints of future trouble with his family, but they seem to fade,

+

especially if/when kids appear in the picture. The marriage seems to

+

ground out the conflict, if not disperse it (to use a metaphor that

+

Yanyu wouldn't...)

+

+

There's a path four, but it seems unlikely and weird and epic, and

+

it's something that your astrology doesn't seem to cover very well.

+

+

Looking at path three in more detail - you're actually surprised by how

+

well he seems to work as a husband for Lijuan.

+

+

==The Steward of the Roof of the World==

+

+

He's a Dog - it looks like the sort of thing that's a common trait of

+

the family line.

+

+

In general, it looks like he's a good steward, though that is not

+

<i>totally</i> the same as being a good king - he's invested in protecting

+

and maintaining the status quo. Things that have always been good stay

+

good, things that have always been bad will probably not be on the fast

+

track to being fixed. He's a protector rather than a leader.

+

+

If the line of kings returns, that will be very hard for him personally.

+

First, it's something that he will resist - he'll think of it as not

+

wanting to relinquish the country to someone who is untried and

+

unworthy, but his bar for unworthy is going to be very hard to clear.

+

Someone with "Successful king for a decade, did amazing things for

+

country" on their resume, he might grudgingly be forced to accept, but

+

there's obviously not anyone with that on the resume who's likely to be

+

a candidate. Second, if he is ousted, he'll have lost the Meaningful

+

and Important and Loyal thing that he was doing, and that will crush

+

him. Dogs do not take well to being fired.

+

+

==[[Son of the Moon|Xingfu Yin-Xiang]]==

+

+

Half-spirits tend to be one of two types - more or less normal mortals,

+

possibly with interesting talent, or particularly unusual people (still

+

technically mortals) with a much stronger spirit-ish nature. Xingfu

+

Yin-Xiang is the latter, and as such, he is powerful, long-lived, and

+

comparatively fixed in his nature. Like the moon, which is especially

+

bright at night by virtue of being surrouded by darkness, he is powerful

+

compared to the average mortal, but is also more convinced of his own

+

power and importance than he really is. Much of the rest of his

+

personality is like this - he really was powerfully smitten with the

+

Daughter of the Sun, but to his own mind, he was more smitten than

+

anyone in the history of love had ever been, and the epicness of his

+

love justified whatever he did in the name of it. He has a grudge

+

against Takanata for thwarting him, which magnifies to Righteous and

+

Epic Vengeance. In the past, his over-dramatic and over-reactive nature

+

has been bent to the cause of more reasonable goals - there is a town in

+

the Roof of the World that owes the lives of a generation to his efforts

+

on their behalf, before his obsession with the Duchess, and there will

+

be times in the future where the full force and fury of his attention

+

will be turned towards more beneficial ends again.

+

+

His current path has two major ways in which his future can branch.

+

First, his goal of vengeance against Takanata will drive him to

+

dangerous possibilities and potential dangerous alliances, which could

+

take him in different directions. Second, his explicit severing from a

+

connection the Duchess does leave the potential for another connection,

+

which might be more easily made now than waiting for his nature to

+

naturally and slowly bend towards another.

+

+

==Elder Mong==

+

He's a Magpie, motivated by ambition both for him personally and for his

+

house. He's politically savvy but not subtle; he's the drive behind the

+

House Mong plans, but he's not the detail guy. He's decently smart, but

+

not charismatic. He'd call himself blunt; his enemies would say

+

boorish. The Magpie factors in for his motives, which are

+

greed/ambition, but there's definitely some of the Monkey to him as well

+

- better to do *something*, even if it isn't the best plan, than to wait

+

until your plans are perfect, which means never doing anything. That's

+

the heart of why House Mong kept doing the bandit thing - it had maybe a

+

50% chance of working to advance their goals, but doing nothing had a 0%

+

chance of working. With enemies but no allies, doing nothing dooms them

+

to being frittered away again and the failure of their house; now that

+

they're allied with Tsui they're on a better footing but he hasn't yet

+

changed his tactics to reflect that.

[[Category:Stuff We Know]]

[[Category:Stuff We Know]]

Latest revision as of 19:17, 1 December 2018

These are the results of Yanyu generating horoscopes for various people. In order to do a horoscope some basic information is needed. (Yes, it's a Power 5 information shtick, but alas we can't just get a horoscope for the Obsidian Warlord or whomever unless we also have his date and place of birth.)

PCs

Zhu Cai Wen

(Done between A River Befouled and Compass Rose)

His great strength, and his most auspicious futures, come from his
building connections - both to himself and between others. Because of
this, he is less well suited to a single strong connection to one
person, and this is kind of sad (from your point of view) - he's most
likely to have lots of girlfriends but never marry.

He was set up to oppose Lucky Chang by the Butterfly, even before the
run started. The Hand of Fate will likely help some, but it will not
bring him to that crux by itself. If he doesn't have a good set of
connections by the time he engages Lucky Chang, he will lose.

Shen Wei Han

(Done after Compass Rose)

If the location of his birth (a village in the foothills of the Roof of the World - near the Qin Chao Steppes border) is correct then he is considerably older than 30 winters.

Deng Zhihao

(Done during Book 2)

There are two different things that his life has the potential to
entangle with, and both of them seem fairly likely. One is clearly the
complicated path tied up with the rest of the party - there are chances
for glory there, but also death; high honors or ignominy. The other
path is in many ways more personal, and you think this has to do with
his vendetta against the tongs. This also has different ways it can go
- there is an opportunity for love, but also heartbreak and betrayal, of
loyalties greatly tested and questions about family. There are at least
several possible threads of his future in this tangle, in which he kills
someone who he shouldn't / didn't want to / immediately regretted /
something.

You cast the horoscope for Kasumi, and at first, it seems to say she'll
grow to be a minor ladyling, marry reasonably well, be a little happy
but never quite satisfied, raise more or less good children, and die.

That can't be right.

You look closer, and lo, there is a minor unlikely encounter which
wildly diverts her path. Yup, *that*'s the one she followed. Much of
the rest of her path seems to follow that initial unlikeliness - she has
the gleeful randomness of the Monkey, but she is touched by the Wing of
the Butterfly, and her small randomnesses will amplify into storms
countries away.

This is a knife edge to walk - which is appropriate, because her nature
is the knife - too much craziness and she will topple things she really
didn't mean to, but too little craziness, too much second-guessing, and
she will lose the random path that gives her such power.

She is the razor knife of the Butterfly - able to destroy what she
touches and the Butterfly needs destroyed - amplified by the madness of
the Monkey. She is possibly more terrifying than anyone else whose
horoscope you have ever read.

Li Merit

He's had a complicated life, and it doesn't get simpler in the future.
You can see how he starts fairly simple, a lot of Magpie tactical
influence, a bit of Butterfly strategic influence. He does thing, his
life gets more complicated, he gets more powerful, encompasses more
plans and plots and contacts. He's starting to spread himself a little
too thin - a little *too* many plots and contacts to juggle, when you
see a strong influence of someone else becoming a more major part of his
life. Probably a lover, possibly just a very dear friend, possibly a
spouse. That partnership seems to give him more confidence and more
energy, but that may actually be overconfidence - his life gets even
more complicated, and then there's a Bad Thing that happens. The other
person is gone after that - either dead or completely out of contact
with him - and his life spirals more out of control, as all the balls he
has in the air start dropping. It's about a year later when things all
go crash, and it seems like something tears whole parts of his self
away.

Then when he starts travelling again, it's less Magpie, more Butterfly,
but not intentionally Butterfly on his part. More recently, he's more
actively embraced Butterfly, but also actively embraced Magpie again.
You wonder if he's starting to put too many balls in the air again - you
can see possible futures where there is another crash, and other
possible futures where he keeps things smoothly in play.

Wu Shuyan

Yanyu charts out Shuyan's horoscope - the exact location and close time
makes it pretty easy to get fairly detailed. It's a very meandering
path, but the interesting thing about it is that there are a *lot* of
low-probability important possibilities, most of which don't seem to go
much of anywhere. She's in the right place and the right time a *lot*,
like plots find her weirdly magnetic. You can trace out the connection
where she was in the right place at the right time to hook up with the
Si Fan, and that's interesting and important in the future. Then
there's other possibilities - recently, she was in the right place at
the right time to be very significant to the Immortals plot, but that
possibility seems to have faded out. There are a lot of possibilities
in the past which have faded, and there are more coming in the future,
but it's not that there is one possibility, it's that there is a huge
potential for importance that seems to get her tangled in things very
easily.

Tokai Takanata

(done late in Book Five)

Overall the arc of his life is "a whole bunch of Butterfly wandering early, then a nigh-tortouse-like middle, then a whole bunch of Butterfly wandering late in life."

The early wandering is a little bit more classic Butterfly -- lots of encounters, which change the world in small ways and change him in small ways, but are not Obviously Significant. The one obvious counterexample to that is his connection with the Jasmine River, which changes him significantly, both in the near future (deepening him, his art gets better) and in the farther future (his path inclines more towards the unusual and weird, sending him in the direction of the I Ching rather than staying only an artist).

The later wandering is more what astrology would term a Storm Butterfly -- random encounters and wandering causing much more significant effects. There's an extent to which his wandering is less random now, but even so, the most important things he is doing are not specifically the ones that are part of a deliberate path, but the ones that are kind of the random side effects of the whims that take him as he wanders. (The freeing of the Ice Pagoda is probably the biggest example, and slightly less whimful than some of the others, but you can see a lot of smaller lives that are going in a totally different direction after encounters with Takanata, like Ando, Jin and the Black Duke.)

Circus Folk

Mystic Mondo

(Done early in Book 7)

Mondo is a Tortoise. In some sense he is like a rock (the way some
tortoises are); the water of the world washes over and past him and he
maintains equanimity. And in some sense his un-movingness makes him
almost kind of Butterfly - he does not move, but the world passes by
him randomly, which is in many ways the same as moving around
randomly. Of course, he does move around - he travels with the circus
- but mystically, he remains still, nearly as much as you imagine Li
Kao or Quan Lo does.

As you think about it, you realize that you are pretty still as well.
The circus moves around and you follow them, but in essense all is the
same from your point of view much of the time. You've seen Mondo,
you've seen Li Kao, and they have never seen each other. You see how
the Tortoises move and are still, know and are known, but are ever
isolated from each other. You could bring them toge...

Then you blink and notice that one of your Tao is gone (spent until
the end of the puttering). You're also very tired - much more so than
after a normal reading.

NPCs

Please treat all horoscopes for NPCs as party secrets, not to be shared lightly. Some of these are pretty sensitive in nature.

As mentioned before, he's a Dog with hints towards Phoenix; that
manifests as a nigh-unbreakable sense of duty which constrains his
actions and his life quite a bit. He does seem to have a decent shot at
becoming Firelord - if he marries Kuan-Xi, it's pretty much guaranteed.

If he doesn't become Firelord, his possibilities branch out a lot,
though almost none of them take him off of the Shrouded Isle
permanently.

Looking at the farther-future possibilities for if he does become
Firelord - it's more complicated, because it depends a lot on how the
future goes in the Empire-wide case. To digress a bit, his is one of
the first horoscopes you've seen that seems to be impinged upon by what
you *think* is the question of whether or not the PCs succeed in
thwarting the Spider - it's hard to directly see that sort of thing in
astrology, because the Great Cycle is the underlying assumption, and
astrology isn't designed to address "what happens if the Cycle changes?"
any more than football odds are designed to take into effect what
happens if gravity changes.

Anyhow, you *think* that if the PCs fail (and it becomes the Empire of
the Spider, or whatever happens in that future), then he's not at all
the right Firelord - the Shrouded Isle would be better served by someone
much more ruthless. If the PCs succeed, he's much more appropriate.

His early years taught him to hate being poor. A shaping event when
he was young taught him to hate being the manipulatee rather than the
manipulator, and taught him the value of manipulation.

These two forces drove his early path, towards the gathering of wealth
and control (though it took him a while to actually get good at it).

About ten winters back, his path took a sharp uptick from "general
gathering of wealth and control" to "alliance with others for much
greater wealth and control", and that has continued since.

He is very ambitious, very smart, very charismatic, somewhat
vindictive, and always calculating the odds.

Looking towards his future, the next ten years are momentous - they
will shape both his own destiny, and that of the whole Empire.

He could become Emperor. (There are really not very many people about
whom that could be said, so it really stands out in the horoscope.)

Version 2.0 (Done after Bear For Sale)

He's definitely a Dragon.

His early years taught him to hate being poor. A shaping event when he
was young taught him to hate being the manipulatee rather than the
manipulator, and taught him the value of both manipulation and decisive
action.

These two forces drove his early path, towards the gathering of wealth
and control (though it took him a while to actually get good at it), and
of the value of betting on the winning side.

About ten winters back, his path took a sharp uptick from "general
gathering of wealth and control" to "alliance with others for much
greater wealth and control", and that continued for some time. His
alliance was severed relatively recently; he was unable to reforge it,
so he spent no more time pursuing the bets he had already lost, and has
made a new alliance with what he perceives to be the side now likely to
win.

He is very ambitious, very smart, very charismatic, somewhat
vindictive, and always calculating the odds.

Looking towards his future, the next ten years are momentous - they
will shape both his own destiny, and that of the whole Empire.

He could become Emperor. (There are really not very many people about
whom that could be said, so it really stands out in the horoscope.)

Suzuki Kuan-Xi

(Done between Over the River and Through the Woods and Touched by the Dragon)

Reading her horoscope, you get the strange feeling that you're looking
at one you've seen before. Not so much that you've ever encountered
one like her before, it's just that her horoscope is filled with
"stock answers". Like she's in the world to fill a specific role,
rather than to create and shape a destiny of her own. The role is not
fixed, but it's dependent upon others, not herself. She can be
someone's wife. She can be someone's prize. She can serve as
inspiration or goad, but it will all be for other's benefit or harm.
The main choices available to her is who these other people will be.

The more she tries to choose for her own reasons, the less successful
she will be. You find yourself tearing up a little at the sadness of
it.

As you start laying out her horoscope, the first thing that comes up is
the horrible realization that she is about to die. Or maybe has just
died, moments ago. In a bit of a panic, you look closer at the details,
and realize that it's not that at all - it's that her past is fixed (as
well it should be), but - it's not that she has no future, but that it's
not clearly laid out. There is *nothing* in her Yet. You think you
might be able to push through and staple some of her Yet down, but
you're not sure what that would do.

Anyway, some interesting features of the past in her horoscope:

One, she really is extraordinarily random. None of her lines are
straight, even though they often drunkwalk in graceful curves that you
can only see in retrospect.

Two, there are four important people in her life: her brother, her
husband, her best friend, and her son.

When her brother left the Isle of Beauty, it took one of her guiding
stars and fixed it ever at the Hidden City, or at the Spider, you're not
sure which. Ever since then, her randomness has been influenced by that
- not *guided* by the Spider, not that at all -, more like ever opposed
to it, as a spinning sling stone is always pulling *away* from the
central hand it is tied to.

Now her best friend is dead, and her balance is wildly disturbed; it
isn't clear how that resolves, since there's no Yet.

First, their horoscopes fit together very well over the course of time.
Sometimes they're lovers, sometimes allies, sometimes something like
rivals, but each of them is always part of the pair, whatever the pair
is. Second, their overall path is strongly tied to the path of the
country; this is something that has been increasing over time, and
continues to increase in most of their potential futures. If the
country prospers, they will prosper even more. If the country succumbs
to problems, they will crash and burn badly.

For both of them, the subject of children is complicated, and it's one
of the few places where they don't totally match. There are potential
futures where there are children, and there are other potential futures
where there are not, but it's not as simple as infertility, you're
pretty sure.

For both of them, you think there's a desire for children, but that it's
countered by other complexities. For him, it works out a little bit
more simply - one way to have children would be to take a second wife,
but in most of the potential futures in which he does so, it's
disruptive to the pair balance the two of them have. You suspect he
suspects this. For her, there's a big tangle that is hard to parse
out - about the only thing you tease out is that she wants daughters but
does not want daughters, and you're not sure what to make of that.

You don't think there's anything that falls out of the the horoscope as
a great burning desire for either of them - there's ambition there, the
desire to achieve more than they currently have / are doing, the desire
to not fail in various different ways...

Her family bloodline and is bloodline an are ancient basically and
just noble one one, generation which up has from suffered peasants,
attack and and of multiple no attempts particular to note wipe other
it than out her. completely She since is it most fell; interesting
yet because the of bloodline her maintains strong and association
persists with because Jin it (you carries can the see blood her of
lines the tangled Bear, with the his) standard and for you persistence
can under see duress. that The the attempts association to brings
wipe her it both out advancement are and coming danger. dangerously
There close is and definitely may some find sort her of soon. danger
There in is her something future, very but familiar it to is you not
about clear this what. horoscope.

Siew Zhuai

He's the loyal scion of a house with a Doomed Destiny. In the past,
he's been groomed to be the heir and one of the future house
decision-makers, but he was young and didn't actually make any
decisions. He's clearly under other people's fairly strong control
until pretty recently, when a lot of his family, including the person in
his family who controlled him most directly, died, and his choices
opened up some.

(Looking back, you can see the signs of this Family Doomed Destiny going
back for cycles and cycles.)

From here, there are three obvious paths.

Path one is he dies pretty soon. Kawaii kills him, or Shen-Ji murders
him, or he gets wounded and Shuyan doesn't bother to heal him - there's
any number of choices kind of floating around.

Path two is he leaves again, and his path goes back to his family. He
probably doesn't kill Lijuan personally, or anything like that, but he
becomes part of a Family Destiny to oppose her family. Maybe his kids
will kill her kids. Maybe her kids will kill his kids. It's all a
future muddle, and the future keeps going like the past.

Path three is he marries Lijuan, and his destiny gets swamped by hers.
There's hints of future trouble with his family, but they seem to fade,
especially if/when kids appear in the picture. The marriage seems to
ground out the conflict, if not disperse it (to use a metaphor that
Yanyu wouldn't...)

There's a path four, but it seems unlikely and weird and epic, and
it's something that your astrology doesn't seem to cover very well.

Looking at path three in more detail - you're actually surprised by how
well he seems to work as a husband for Lijuan.

The Steward of the Roof of the World

He's a Dog - it looks like the sort of thing that's a common trait of
the family line.

In general, it looks like he's a good steward, though that is not
totally the same as being a good king - he's invested in protecting
and maintaining the status quo. Things that have always been good stay
good, things that have always been bad will probably not be on the fast
track to being fixed. He's a protector rather than a leader.

If the line of kings returns, that will be very hard for him personally.
First, it's something that he will resist - he'll think of it as not
wanting to relinquish the country to someone who is untried and
unworthy, but his bar for unworthy is going to be very hard to clear.
Someone with "Successful king for a decade, did amazing things for
country" on their resume, he might grudgingly be forced to accept, but
there's obviously not anyone with that on the resume who's likely to be
a candidate. Second, if he is ousted, he'll have lost the Meaningful
and Important and Loyal thing that he was doing, and that will crush
him. Dogs do not take well to being fired.

Half-spirits tend to be one of two types - more or less normal mortals,
possibly with interesting talent, or particularly unusual people (still
technically mortals) with a much stronger spirit-ish nature. Xingfu
Yin-Xiang is the latter, and as such, he is powerful, long-lived, and
comparatively fixed in his nature. Like the moon, which is especially
bright at night by virtue of being surrouded by darkness, he is powerful
compared to the average mortal, but is also more convinced of his own
power and importance than he really is. Much of the rest of his
personality is like this - he really was powerfully smitten with the
Daughter of the Sun, but to his own mind, he was more smitten than
anyone in the history of love had ever been, and the epicness of his
love justified whatever he did in the name of it. He has a grudge
against Takanata for thwarting him, which magnifies to Righteous and
Epic Vengeance. In the past, his over-dramatic and over-reactive nature
has been bent to the cause of more reasonable goals - there is a town in
the Roof of the World that owes the lives of a generation to his efforts
on their behalf, before his obsession with the Duchess, and there will
be times in the future where the full force and fury of his attention
will be turned towards more beneficial ends again.

His current path has two major ways in which his future can branch.
First, his goal of vengeance against Takanata will drive him to
dangerous possibilities and potential dangerous alliances, which could
take him in different directions. Second, his explicit severing from a
connection the Duchess does leave the potential for another connection,
which might be more easily made now than waiting for his nature to
naturally and slowly bend towards another.

Elder Mong

He's a Magpie, motivated by ambition both for him personally and for his
house. He's politically savvy but not subtle; he's the drive behind the
House Mong plans, but he's not the detail guy. He's decently smart, but
not charismatic. He'd call himself blunt; his enemies would say
boorish. The Magpie factors in for his motives, which are
greed/ambition, but there's definitely some of the Monkey to him as well
- better to do *something*, even if it isn't the best plan, than to wait
until your plans are perfect, which means never doing anything. That's
the heart of why House Mong kept doing the bandit thing - it had maybe a
50% chance of working to advance their goals, but doing nothing had a 0%
chance of working. With enemies but no allies, doing nothing dooms them
to being frittered away again and the failure of their house; now that
they're allied with Tsui they're on a better footing but he hasn't yet
changed his tactics to reflect that.